New Anlist users often have questions about how to format text, use links, and so forth. This guide attempts to document just about everything you could ever need to know, so that all of these tips and tricks are explained in one place.

Feel free to suggest changes, or to share/modify this guide as you wish.

PART 1: BASICS

Formatting is based on Markdown, though with a few Anilist-specific quirks such as spoilers or Youtube video embeds. For this reason, I've referred to it as "Anilist-Flavored" Markdown in this guide, like the GitHub Flavored Markdown used by GitHub, or Reddit Flavored Markdown at Reddit.

newlines

Unlike the Original Markdown, newlines "just work" without any messing around. For example, this text:

Hello
world

...will appear as two separate lines, like you'd expect, whereas it "ought to" appear as Hello world (on a single line) according to "original" Markdown.

italic text

Put one * or _ character either side of the text:

_hello_ becomes hello

*world* becomes world

You can also use the HTML <i>...</i> or <em>...</em> tags:

<i>hello</i> becomes hello

<em>hello</em> becomes hello

Note that there is currently a bug where _ doesn't work with less than three characters, so _1_ or _12_ won't work, but _123_ will.

bold text

Put two * or _ characters either side of the text:

__hello__ becomes hello

**world** becomes world

You can also use the HTML <b>...</b> or <strong>...</strong> tags:

<b>hello</b> becomes hello

<strong>hello</strong> becomes hello

This can be combined with italics like so: _**hello world**_

strikethrough text

Put two ~ characters either side of the text:

~~hello~~ becomes hello

You can also use the HTML <del>...</del> or <strike>...</strike> tags:

<del>hello</del> becomes hello

<strike>hello</strike> becomes hello

Again, this can be combined with bold or italic text: ~~**hello** _world_~~

alignment

To center-align text, surround it with either ˜˜˜...˜˜˜ or <center>...</center>:

hello world

For centred, right-aligned, or "justified" text, add align="???" to the HTML <p>...</p> or <div>...</div> tags:

<p align="left">This is kind of pointless...</p>
<p align="center">This is equivalent to the other methods.</p>
<p align="right">This aligns the text to the right.</p>
<p align="justify">This gives you "non-ragged" paragraphs of text.</p>

Note that these all rely on HTML4 features, and so may stop working one day...

quoted text

Begin each line with a > character, or use <blockquote>...</blockquote>:

> hello
> world
<blockquote>hello
world</blockquote>

...becomes:

helloworld

You can "nest" quotes by adding extra > characters, like so:

> hello
>> world

...becomes:

hello

world

Note that quoted text will always appear italic due to Anilist styling.

links

Link to other pages using [the text you see](https://anilist.co/). This will open in a new tab when clicked.

You can also use <a href="https://anilist.co">the text you see</a> HTML, but this will not open in a new tab unless you add target="_blank" (possibly a bug; may change in the future).

Simple links will "just work", and may optionally be surrounded with < and > like so:

PART 2: ANLIST-SPECIFIC FEATURES

Most of the things above will work on any Markdown website, but this section covers things that are specific to Anilist.

Note that most or all of these will always be converted, even if they're put inside code blocks!

spoiler text

Surround text you want to hide with ~&excl;...&excl;~ like so:

~!some spoiler text!~

Using <div rel="spoiler">some spoiler text</div> also works for now, but this might not be the case in the future - stick with the Markdown approach!

Note that the spoiler text feature has a few bugs at the moment:

~&excl;...&excl;~ is converted even in code blocks, so it can be difficult to explain how it works to other users.

It doesn't interact well with ˜˜˜...˜˜˜ or <center>...</center>; it puts the "hidden" text after the Spoiler, click to view block.

Hopefully, these will be fixed in the future, but for now, be careful to avoid unintentionally revealing spoilers to other users!

youtube videos

Surround the URL with youtube&lpar;...&rpar; like so:

youtube&lpar;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0q0QeQbw9U&rpar;

Note that only the D0q0QeQbw9U part is actually required:

youtube(D0q0QeQbw9U)

Again, this is always converted - even in code blocks.

other videos

Surround the URL with webm&lpar;...&rpar; like so:

webm&lpar;https://files.kiniro.uk/video/sonic.webm&rpar;

These embeds will play (and loop) automatically, and are muted by default:

webm(https://files.kiniro.uk/video/sonic.webm)

Note that, despite the name, any audio or video file will work - but may not actually be supported by all browsers.

PS: Does not interact well with code blocks.

PART 3: EMOJI AND UNICODE

This section covers a few things to be aware of if you want to post emojis (or other non-ASCII characters) on Anilist.

tl;dr

Run everything through this before you post on Anilist and you should be fine.

longer version

Any Unicode character whose "code point" is more than 65535 (FFFF hexadecimal) will cause the rest of your post to be "cut off" and disappear, because, well, MySQL. Unfortunately, this includes (almost) all emojis, plus various other "unusual" Unicode characters.

Using HTML magic, you can "manually" include these characters like so:

🤔 = &#129300; (decimal) or &#x1f914; (hexadecimal)

The Unicodifier does this for you, converting any code-points over 65535 into &#this; format so that they won't cause problems when you post them on the Anilist website.

PART 4: MISCELLANEOUS

This section covers a few odds and ends which sometimes get asked about on the global feed.

linked images

To have an image take you somewhere when you click on it, simply wrap it in an ordinary Markdown link: